The ability of users to initiate tasks such as report generation, system maintenance functions, and other process scheduling and execution tasks within the hardware, communications networks, software, and data storage components of distributed computing environments is critical to the businesses and organizations that rely on these computing environments. Such systems are often the lifeblood of businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies, and the like. These distributed computing environments are required to support the needs of the organization at the hardware level, to provide internal and external networking needs, to support various software capabilities for end users and administrators, and to provide back-end data storage solutions. For such systems to be effective and useful to an organization, they must provide all of these capabilities in a secure, reliable, stable, and scalable infrastructure that offers a high level of performance for users inside and outside of the organization.
In many distributed computing environments, user applications may provide no capability for end users to generate reports and to schedule and execute other user-restricted processes. In such systems, users may be required to request help from system administrators or other authorized users to execute these user-restricted processes. System administrators and authorized users may schedule and execute these processes by accessing secure administrative applications or specific secure transaction pages within user applications. Providing end users with access to these secure applications and pages may cause security risks and system vulnerabilities. Moreover, scheduling and executing processes within a distributed environment may be a complex activity requiring the user initiating the scheduling and execution request to have specific knowledge and to perform actions in multiple system components. For example, a user that schedules a process for execution may need to have functional knowledge of the application run control which contains the functional set of parameters for executing processes. Additionally, the user may need to have knowledge of the scheduling parameters to be provided in order to schedule and execute the process, such as the system servers, user distribution lists, and the like. Such users also may be required to navigate across multiple application pages, such as application run control pages and process request pages in order to schedule the process. In this example, the user also may need to navigate to a process monitor page in order to monitor the progress of the process scheduling and execution, and to obtain status updates along with links to reports and other outputs generated by the process.